Why hate instead of love? Why war instead of peace? Why killing instead of life-giving? Those whose lives are filled with hate and war and killing were never loved, or not enough. To realize this metamorphosis from hate to love and other manifestations thereof, we must, singly and collectively, come to the realization that despite different appearances, different languages, different religions, different cultures, we all are brothers and sisters of the family of humanity. The borders that divide us are not on maps, but in our minds and hearts. The air and oceans of Earth do not recognize national borders, nor does the pandemic. Why should we? LOVE--of self and all others--is what ineluctably bonds us together--one, not many. Let all the years ahead be an on-going world picnic where we celebrate all our surface differences, rather than dreading them, rather than hating them, rather than destroying them. Let love be our shared, eternal future, not extinction. You are the match that lights the fire of Love on Earth forever.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

For along time, I've felt James Taylor and I are spiritual brothers. Even though Taylor was born in Boston and I in Dallas, the former grew up in North Carolina and I in Kansas. His father was a physcian, mine an attorney. Taylor attended Milton Academy, I graduated from Andover. Taylor began to experience serious emotional problems in prep school;  I had to drop out of law school when I could not sleep. We are both in our 70s now, I a bit older than he. Taylor spent time in several psychiatric hospitals in and around New England. I spent a couple of years at Menningers, ironically only a half block from where I grew up. Taylor learned how to play the guitar and began to sing the songs he composed. I, in turn, began to write poetry when in therapy I discovered I had feellngs--my own feelings--and when they unconsciously married my intellect, and out popped my first poem:  WHAT A GOOD LITTLE BOY. Many others were to fellow, but all my poems write themselves. I can still feel when a poem is rising up within me. It feels like a Kundalini arising. My job is only to "record" it, which is to say, grab a pencil or a pen, perhaps a tpyewritter, now a deskstop computer. Each poem begins in my unconscious where lie all its components--syntax, diction, all my emotions:--then moves into my subconscious, and finally into my conscious mind. And that's the moment I have to "record" it, because if I don't do that immediately, my poem floats into the infinite Cosmos never to be found again. Writing a poem is like making love:  if you have to force it, stop. Poetry is like the ocean wind:  it blows only for those sails that are open. My sense is that Taylor has a similar experience when he composes. That's why I feel he and I are spiritual brothers.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

I am my own best friend.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

I don't need adornment;
I don't wear a ring.
I sing in the forest;  no one
need hear my sorrow sung.
I am my own audience;
I lament the dying limbs.
My discernments are sufficient.
I see the world as most others don't.
The squirrels that scamper underfoot
keep me company;  bluebirds offer
the recitative. From a distance, I
descry an old farmhouse where a
family long departed once raised
corn and three sons. Cows and
chickens milled about. An old
pick-up took the family where it
needed to go. Now it sits abandoned,
paint chipping, rust increasing with
every rain. Barber's "Adagio for Strings"
wafts through my mind;  tears slowly
slide down my cheeks. There is a
creek nearby that tries to console me.
The yellow sun meanders through
white clouds and blue sky. I cry more.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Before social stratification (differences in wealth and power versus lack thereof) hunter/gatherers rarely fought. They were all equal and sensed it.

But when groups became big enough, they formed cities like Sumer in Mesopotamia, and concomitantly some people got wealthy and powerful while most did not.

Society, therefore, became, in time, stratified and in more time created superficial distinctions among the people of that city.

Obviously, my commentary is grossly oversimplified, but the point I'm going to make here is spot-on;  namely, what has never changed among human beings is the locus of everyone's innate, inviolable worth, which is within each one of us, not without.

But the people of Sumer and other cities that followed were duped by the illusions of wealth and power as being worth, and that led to stratification of different groups based on false premises. And that led to making some groups slaves while the wealthy and powerful remained, they thought, superior.  

This was the wrong turn in the fork in the road humanity took.

Humanity thus forgot we all have the same worth, and this inimical illusion only ballooned over millennia.

The right fork we need to find is the one the hunter/gatherers had taken and the whole world needs quickly to take that fork again before we all destroy Earth.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

“I am the best thing that ever
walked into your life.” I won’t
ever have to say that to her.
It’s like a Christmas present.
You don’t tell the girl you’re
giving it to what’s in the package.
She has to open it. She has to
tear off the paper and bow.
She will feel it the rest of her
life and cry tears of joy.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Sing to me, o southern hill
where my mother lies,
she near the river
where other children
only her eyes could spy,
her fingers feel.
Willow trees, arcing oaks,
pillows made of amethyst and
amaryllis, beechnut spread,
linen spread by old Mill Creek,
cattle grazing, hazy August
afternoons, all alone was she
except in fantasy.
No love from Mother,
her Father farther
away than Ozymandias.
Tears she used
in her high tea;
no spoon had she.
She wept beneath a yellow sun,
a sister to the gentle sea,
the golden waves of wheat.

Tod Howard Hawks